Train tour to reveal North Korea's 'undiscovered cities'

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Travelling in vintage 1970s train carriages with dining cars and beds, visitors on a pioneering rail journey through North Korea will travel to places “very rarely seen” by foreigners.

Passengers on the ‘Eastern Adventure by Rail’ trip, run by Koryo Tours, a Beijing-based operator that specialises in holidays to North Korea, will venture to "as yet undiscovered cities” including Sinpho and Kimchaek, while seeing remote beaches.

Visitors will take the inaugural train ride to Mount Myohyang, known for its fresh air, from Pyongyang, and visit the area’s main attraction, the International Friendship Exhibition, which houses all the gifts presented to the country’s former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il through the years by various world figures.

The train on which tourists to North Korea will travel (Photo: Koryo Tours)

Travellers on the tour will be the first foreigners to experience a local tram ride in Chongjin, North Korea’s third largest city, where the tour includes a visit to the Foodstuffs Factory, said to provide "fascinating insight into the production of consumer goods”. Guests then before board an overnight charter train for Wonsan, a coastal city that is "frozen in time" and home to socialist buildings and public spaces from the 1970s and 1980s.

The tour of Wonsan includes visits to the small hotel where Kim Il Sung once stayed and the Old Railway Station from where he departed on his return to Pyongyang after the country’s liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. The journey back to the capital from Wonsan will pass waterfalls, lakes and "quiet local settlements", while glimpsing the towns of Yangdok and Sinyang.

A local village outside Pyongyang (Photo: Koryo Tours)

The 11-day rail tour, which runs from October 2 at €2,890 per person, will be the second time foreign tourists have been allowed to travel on this itinerary in North Korea, after the operator's first trip last year. This followed several years of requests made to the North Korean government for permission to operate the tour. A train service between Pyongyang and Beijing has already been available to tourists for several years.

"But this year's tour will include more unseen places," Simon Cockerell, general manager of Koryo Tours, told CNN.

Chongjn, North Korea (photo: Koryo Tours)

"Pyongyang has been developing in recent years, with lots of shiny new buildings [being built]," Mr Cockerell said.

"Chongjin plans to do the same too, but it hasn't so it's more like what lots of tourists would expect Pyongyang, or North Korea, to be like," he added.

A bus outside a railway station in Pyongyang (Photo: Koryo Tours)

The notoriously reclusive nation lifted a four-month ban this March preventing foreign tourists from crossing its borders over fears that the Ebola virus might enter the country.